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BitterSweet – a beer and chocolate pairing event

On the heels of last month’s Craft:Beer+Food event, the Washington Beer Blog is proud to present BitterSweet:Beer+Chocolate: an event celebrating the pairing of Seattle’s world class beer with chocolates from Theo Chocolate. Eight of the area’s top breweries will serve their beer alongside confections and chocolates from Theo Chocolate. The participating breweries are also creating unique beers using products from Theo.

Tickets are on sale now for BitterSweet:Beer+Chocolate. The event takes place on Thursday, November 10th, 2011 from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. at Fremont Brewing Company in Seattle, and benefits FamilyWorks, a local food bank and family resource center. The price is $35 per person. Tickets are available via the event website: www.bittersweetseattle.com.

Attendees will have the opportunity to sample the chocolate-beer pairings as well as the special chocolate beers. Musical entertainment will be provided by Swing Soiree, a local gypsy jazz band.

For those familiar with the Urban Beer Garden at Fremont Brewing, that is not where this event is taking place. BitterSweet will make use of the back room at Fremont Brewing. The room, which is usually reserved for keg storage and barrel aging, will be transformed into an elegant, industrial, rustic and romantic event space.

Guests at Craft:Beer+Food, the event we produced last month. (photo by Dikla Tuchman)

We selected eight Seattle-area breweries to participate. Each brewery is producing a beer using products from Theo Chocolate. In some cases, this includes new beer styles never before brewed. Also, each brewery will provide a beer from its regular lineup that will be paired with a particular Theo Chocolate. Attendees will sample the specialty beers, as well as the beer+chocolate pairings, and then vote for their favorites.

“Hey, you got beer in my chocolate!”

“No, you got chocolate in my beer!”

To get the ball rolling, we facilitated a meeting with the brewers and the experts at Theo Chocolates. Producing artisan chocolate is not too much different than creating craft beer. It is as much a creative process as it is a scientific process. We quickly learned that brewers and chocolatiers speak the same language.

One thing we knew heading into it, there is a little bit of Willie Wonka in every great brewer. At that meeting, the room was full of creative energy (and beer, and chocolate). It was magic. There were some crazy ideas involving chocolate, chocolate byproducts, and even the wild yeast used to ferment cocoa beans. Maybe it was the serious chocolate buzz talking, but we all left the meeting feeling as if we were about do something magical and unprecedented.

We selected these breweries for a few different reasons. Some of them have previously worked with chocolate. Some are known to be wildly creative and daring; indeed, a trait we thought would come in handy for the task at hand. Admittedly there was a fair bit of happenstance and nepotism involved as well. In choosing these eight breweries we do not mean to discount the creativity or skill of the other 145 breweries in Washington. We simply didn’t have room for everyone.

We invite you to join us for an amazing evening of Beer and Chocolate.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate..